


Turning of the Season

by inheritedjeans



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Episode: s06e22 The Man Who Knew Too Much, Gen, Memory Loss, Sam Winchester's Wall
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-24
Updated: 2013-03-24
Packaged: 2017-12-06 09:23:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/734098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inheritedjeans/pseuds/inheritedjeans
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hell was louder and longer and brighter than the time Sam spent on earth. So Dean should have expected this--Sam is forgetting, piece by piece. Post 6.22 AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Turning of the Season

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on LJ.

The Impala was spreading the legs of the great American West when Dean finally admitted to himself that the fractures in Sam’s mind were swallowing him piece by piece. Dean had one hand curled around the wheel’s slim frame and the other was sliding along the open window frame. Sam was slouched so far down in his seat next to him that the sunset was riding shotgun, and Sam was dreaming silent dreams, that day.  
  
Or at the very least, he was dreaming silently. Once, that might have meant something, but the field had changed, new battles lines were drawn, and Dean just didn’t know anymore.  
  
(Didn’t know his own brother anymore, just like his brother didn’t know him.)  
  
“Screw you, Cas. Just... He was fine before you... and now... Fuck.” But Cas wasn’t listening, too busy playing dress up in his Father’s clothes. Dean knew exactly how tiring, how time-consuming, that could be.  
  
The steady purr of the engine and the even rasp of tires on asphalt were quiet, and Sam was dreaming silently. Dean had never dealt well with silence, not growing up as he did with Dad pumping mullet rock and Sammy screaming his ear off whenever he pleased, and his newer need to drive Hell out of his mind only encouraged his aversion to such unsettling and abnormal quiet. The rattle of chains and rasping sound of screams escaping from gory throats and around torn vocal chords was ever loud in his mind, and more familiar to him than any earthly sound, but he could blast the radio louder.  
  
(Alistair, he laughed and laughed, because  _you will never chase me out, Dean. I am here for you always, Dean._ )  
  
The first station to shatter the car’s silence was playing Asia. Was playing the song that pulled Sam into a reticence it would take hours to drag him out of. But after Sam flinched awake, the thud of music too loud to sleep through, he stopped Dean’s hand as he reached out to flip to a station that wouldn’t give anyone nightmares.  
  
“No, wait,” Sam said, thinking too hard. “I know this song. It’s... familiar. Keep it on.”  
  
That wasn’t right. That wasn’t nearly right at all. But Dean didn’t say a word, because it had been at least a few weeks since Sam had recognized any song at all. Sammy didn’t need to know just why it fucking sucked that this was the only song he could hum along to.  
  
\-----  
  
Dean forgot how it was, sometimes, when he was feeling particularly good; not quite happy, maybe, but at least content, and that was a victory in itself.  
  
(Hell was quiet, the world was roaring, and there was nothing in his mind but this now and that distant horizon of forever after.)  
  
He was feeling that not-quite-happy one night, after a few beers but before he'd picked up any broads; after the killings had stopped and the job was done in a town just west of Denver. Alcohol loosed the strings that bound his happier memories in tight protection.  
  
"Mansfield, Ohio. You remember, Sammy? Me and Dad were wrapped in a hunt and you decided to bring a girl over. Man, the look on Dad's face when we got back early. Still don't know which one of you was more embarrassed."  
  
It was the uneasy smile on Sam's face that stopped him. See, Dean forgot, sometimes, just how much Sam didn't remember.  
  
( _He forgets, just as much as you try to,_  slithered a voice in Dean’s ear, and it was right.)  
  
The night was shrouded in a thousand piercing screams, and Sam watched him with eyes that asked a thousand questions never voiced.  
  
\-----  
  
It was the hunting (alone and together, just like before, back when angels where things of legend and demons were an exotic mystery) that sharpened Dean’s focus on Sam’s leaking mind. There was something just  _off_  about Sam, like he was losing pieces of himself. Kind of scared the shit out of Dean, actually. Because it was so much like hunting with the Sam-that-wasn’t, the soulless Sam--less of a robot, sure, but just as foreign. Sam just didn’t get into that flow, the rhythm of the hunt, the way he always had with Dean. In the all-too-frequent split-second pinches where one small delay could mean everything, Sam fumbled it every time. They stumbled into each other, both reaching for the shovel instead of the sawed-off, and Sam kept checking his six as if Dean didn’t have it covered already.  
  
“Jesus, Sam,” Dean said to the lump lying on the innermost bed. “I always got your back. You  _know_  that.”  
  
Except Sam didn’t. Not anymore. ( _Maybe not ever again. Remember that, Dean._ )  
  
\-----  
  
It would be so much easier if Sam would just stop trying so fucking hard. The kid killed him, when he tried and tried and tried again to get it right. When he showed how much of their reality he ascribed to Hell and how much of Hell he saw etched over reality, cobbling together his own world of illusions woven with memories so thin they were all but entirely wrong.  
  
It was a diner in San Jose on a Thursday morning, during a fucking vicious series of post-mortem mutilation cases for which they had no answers, that Sam said, “Maybe we should call Dad. He’d know. If he’d ever answer.”  
  
The Alistair that lived in Dean’s mind didn’t stop laughing for hours at that.  
  
 _See, Dean,_  echoed the scything voice of Hell,  _Your Sammy boy keeps trying so hard to distinguish the living from the dead, and the earthly from the hellish. Boy, did down below ever do a number on him. Like it didn’t for you, did it? You can tell the difference._  
  
Dean could hear that voice, and he kept listening because it was right, he was right He was right.  
  
 _Because you adapted. You broke and reformed, and you were beautiful._  
  
Sam looked up at Dean, and maybe he could tell he said something wrong again, because this time he said, “I mean, Bobby. Maybe we should call Bobby. We can’t call Dad, can we.”  
  
Though he said it like a statement of known fact, Sam looked up at Dean and asked him still, with eyes that didn’t really understand.  
  
 _But Sammy, he held true, he stayed strong, he never lost sight of why he fell. And now look how wretched he is._  
  
Thursday was still a good day, though. (Probably one of the last.) A day Sam still remembered John at all had to be a good day.  
  
Saturday, Sam flipped The Journal open, picked their family photo (the sun-warmed heat of the car, the smell of leather and of Home, the three of them together and whole) out from under its clip, and stared. Asking  _who am you and who are you and who are these people?_  Saturday, Sam furrowed his brow, his brain, everything, going through the pictures they both hoarded (in a different life, before) in the tin at the bottom of Sam’s duffel.  
  
On that last Saturday, the one that passed marked by Sam’s (too little too late not enough) quiet attempts to pull his mind back to himself, Dean found Sam huddled in the backseat of the Impala. His legs drawn up to his chin, a ratty blanket stretched thin around his shoulders. Sifting through photo after photo, lingering so long on each one. Searching them like he would search the photos they so often clip from the newspapers--strangers filling each and every frame.  
  
He didn’t pause on Jessica’s photo any longer than he did on Jo’s. He didn’t pause to trace along her cheek, and he didn’t lay her aside with the reverence born of love.  
  
Dust kicked up by the wind choked its way down Dean’s throat (which tightened, which lumped together in a knot and strangled him) and ground its way into his eyes. He turned, he left Sam alone with whatever shards of memory he still had, and he felt tear tracks pulling along the dry, dusty skin of his face.  
  
The evening was wind and clear sky; was stripped to its bleakest bone.  
  
\-----  
  
Dean understood Sam, this new Sam with holes in his brain, in ways he had never wanted to understand; not even when he looked at his brother the day he packed his bag for Stanford, leaving family behind in a decision Dean just didn't  _get_ , had he wanted to understand his brother this much. Three weeks after Dean had been pulled out of hell like a weed by the roots he had found himself pressing a girl up against the wall of an almost-clean bathroom, just because she was warm and soft in a way nothing in Hell ever could be.  
  
That was the moment he had felt her face melting apart under his lips, skin sloughing off, teeth decaying under his tongue--just for a second, but that had been enough. He had shoved her away so he could retch himself silly over a toilet.  
  
 _Too many drinks,_  she had said.  _Want some water?_  she had asked.  
  
 _No. That won’t fix anything._  
  
That night he had spent alone, a bottle of whiskey given the dubious honour of his company. He had still been up when Sam had slunk in at a time most people would be getting up for work, looking too bone-tired to pester Dean about sharing and caring, thank heaven’s oh, so merciful angels.  
  
So now, watching as Sam fumbled around the motel room in the dark, watching as he flinched when Dean flipped on the bright white light, watching as he paled and shivered and backed into the corner (saying, “Not you, not here, what do you want from me, what are you doing here, why?”) while sweeping his arms in front of his face, Dean understood. Hell was just that much brighter, that much longer, and it was just that Sam didn’t know which was a dream; didn’t know that neither were.  
  
Sam shook and twitched; shook and bared his neck for Dean as he approached ( _And in your other life, you would have taken it and gloried in his blood and pain. You did; so many times you did._ ) and shuddered in utter silence. Dean stopped and didn’t know what to do.  
  
“Sammy? Sam, it’s me. It’s Dean. You’re home, remember?” Please remember. Please.  
  
For a moment, nothing. Then, Sam slowly dropped his arms and Dean watched as Sam’s face slacked.  
  
“My brother. My brother, Dean. Of course.”  
  
Of course, he says. Like for an instant, just a moment--  
  
 _He forgot and had to be reminded. Remember, Dean, you weren’t the only one to wear that face for him._  
  
\-----  
  
This is the day Dean fears the most, because he knows it will one day come: After a bad day, bad night, bad year, Sam will look up from the laptop he's been trying to fall into, stare him straight in the eyes, and say  _Do I know you?_  without breathing a word aloud.  
  
That is the day Dean will die with such permanence that nothing will be able to bring him back. And it’s coming; it’s almost upon him.  
\--.


End file.
